Tag: Ireland

Many of us remember learning about DNA from either science class during our school days, or perhaps, our favourite detective series or film. But what is DNA? How did it get to be used in the criminal justice system in the first place? Most importantly, how is it being incorporated, used and understood by the criminal justice system? This piece provides a short introduction to this area of law in Ireland.

DNA stands for ‘Deoxyribonucleic Acid.’ A sample of DNA can be extracted from our saliva, blood and bone for example. Each person’s DNA is structured differently, meaning that our DNA is unique to each of us alone. DNA profiling was discovered in 1985 by Sir Alec Jeffries and his colleagues in Leicester, and allowed the development of a ‘DNA profile’ from a physical DNA sample. A DNA profile looks similar to a barcode and is a digital representation of a DNA sample. Following this discovery, DNA became a prominent feature in the investigation of crime.

DNA evidence is important in the context of a crime because it can allow for the identification of a specific person at a crime scene and can help to identify unknown bodies. If DNA is found at a scene and then matched with a suspect, it places the suspect at the scene. DNA evidence has been praised because it is often seen as objective, scientific evidence. This has been considered preferable to other forms of evidence such as witness statements which are often subjective and unreliable. Despite these benefits, a problem can arise if DNA is discovered at a crime scene but there are no suspects to test it against. This limits the ability of DNA to aid in an investigation as, although it was obtained from a crime scene, it cannot be compared with anyone. In light of this, the storing or banking of DNA profiles for comparison purposes became desirable for those investigation crimes. DNA storage allows a DNA profile generated from a crime scene sample to be tested against a range of profiles which have already been collected from a pool of people. This is where the central appeal of DNA databasing originated.

Forensic DNA databases organise and store DNA information for the purposes of criminal investigations, and to aid searches for missing or unidentified persons. Therefore, theyallow “rapid comparison” between profiles collected from crime scenes and profiles collected from people who are included in the database (Bieber, 2004: 29). Another frequently mooted (and often debated) benefit offered by DNA databases is the ability to deter people from committing crime, as criminals may have a heightened expectation of being caught.This claim has been disputed however, both because of the difficulties in actually measuring deterrence, but also because criminals may merely adapt to the new circumstances by becoming more forensically aware.The storage of DNA information, even limited information such as a profile, has attracted much debate, particularly in relation to human rights. For example, while databasing is efficient in terms of managing information, a database can also be used “to track, group and classify people with or without their acquiescence” (Jasanoff, 2010: xx). People who have their DNA profiles stored on a forensic DNA database lose privacy, freedom and autonomy, and may be reluctant to engage in active citizenship (such as in protests) given the ability to identify them (Jasanoff, 2010: xxii).

The Irish DNA Database System

Ireland recently incorporated the DNA Database System into law, under the Criminal Justice (Forensic Evidence and DNA Database System) Act 2014. The2014 Act is extensive, but the main purposes of the Actwere neatly summarised by Colm O’Briain (who also provides a wonderfully succinct synopsis of the 2014 Act) (2014: 1-2). The main purposes include an overhaul of the previous legislation and common law practices in the area of taking DNA samples (from several different groups of people such as offenders, suspects and volunteers), the establishment of the DNA Database System, along with providing management and oversight for the System, and the implementing of the Prüm Council Decision, which provides for the international exchange of DNA evidence. Part 8 of the 2014 Actspecifically addresses the DNA Database System, which is currently controlled by Forensic Science Ireland, an independent body based in the Garda Headquarters in Phoenix Park.

Given the potential of DNA databases, one of the central debates which follows is who (or what offences) should qualify for entry onto the database. Typically, sex offenders are mooted as one of the key categories which should be included on a database. However, most databases extend beyond this to include people who have already been convicted of other serious offences such as murder for example. In some jurisdictions, inclusion criteria are based on the length of the sentence which the offence might warrant (premised on the logic that the more serious the offence, the lengthier the punishment). However, it is not always restricted to people who have been convicted of an offence. A DNA database can also include ‘volunteers’, who are innocent people not convicted or suspected of committing an offence. This has led to discussion on the possibility of population-wide databases, although these are often dismissed as being impracticable both on the grounds of human rights and logistical concerns.

In the case of Irish DNA Database System, there are four main ways that a person’s DNA profile can lawfully appear on same (O’Briain, 2014: 9). These are as follows:

If a person is detained for a relevant offence

A ‘relevant offence’ is an offence for which a person may be detained under Section 9 of the 2014 Act. Offences include those under the Offences Against the State Act 1939, along with drug-trafficking offences, murder, false imprisonment, and offences which may be punished by a term of five years imprisonment or more. O’Briain (2014: 8) neatly summarises that the minimum requirement is an offence with a maximum sentence of at least 5 years.

If a person is an offender or former offender

Offenders are identified as those who have been convicted of a relevant offence and are either (1) serving a sentence, on temporary release or subject to a suspended sentence, (2) convicted before or after the commencement of the Act and sentenced to imprisonment, (3) serving a term of imprisonment on foot of a transfer of prisoners provision (so long as the offence involved corresponds to a relevant offence) or (4) subject to the requirements of Part 2 of theSex Offenders Act 2001at the time of the commencement or at any time thereafter.

If a person volunteers to provide a sample and then allows the profile to be entered onto the System

The taking of DNA samples from volunteers is governed by Part 3 of the Act, with the entry of volunteer profiles onto the DNA Database System covered under Section 28.

If a DNA profile was generated under the previous statutory regime, then it may be entered onto the System under transitional provisions.

Prior to the 2014 Act, the Criminal Justice (Forensic Evidence) Act 1990governed the taking of DNA samples. This provision therefore accommodates the transition of samples collected under the previous legislation and allows such samples to be entered onto the System.

The next debate that follows relates to how long we need to retain this information. As a result, retention periods make up a large part of the discourse on the development of DNA databases around the world. One argument for retaining the information for longer periods of time is that it may mean that detection rates are improved. However, retention of such data has also been considered an invasion of privacy. For example, the UK’s DNA database was subject to “serious scrutiny” which culminated in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) reprimanding the UK’s approach to retention of data in the case of S and Marper v United Kingdom (2008) (Kazemian et al. 2011: 49). England, Wales and Northern Ireland were the only countries in the Council of Europe which allowed for the indefinite retention of DNA data of people who were not convicted of a crime. The ECtHR held that this indefinite retention of data was a violation of Article 8 (the right to privacy) of the European Convention on Human Rights (see Prainsack, 2010: 15-16).

Under the 2014 Act, there are different retention regimes for DNA profiles and samples depending on the origin of the sample. For example, volunteers and those who work in the forensic science laboratory have different retention regimes. It is therefore beyond the scope of this piece to explain each of these different regimes. Instead, this piece specifically considers those who are arrested for a ‘relevant’ offence. In Ireland, the retention regime for this category of persons is quite interesting. Under Section 80 of the 2014 Act,if a person is detained for a relevant offence and their DNA profile is entered onto the System, it is only removed in the following situations:

If proceedings against a person are not instituted within 12 months of taking that sample (unless the reason for the delay is because the person has absconded or cannot be found).

In the case that the proceedings have been instituted, then removal will occur if the person is acquitted of the relevant offence, if the charge is dismissed, or the proceedings discontinued.

If the person’s conviction was identified as a miscarriage of justice.

If the person receives an order under the Probation of Offenders Act 1907 for the relevant offence and they have not been convicted of a relevant offence in the 3 years following that order.

This is subject to Section 81, which allows the Garda Commissioner to extend the retention period for 12 months. This power to extend can be done up to a maximum of 6 years (so extending retention by twelve months six times). The person can however appeal this decision to the District Court. However, there is also a provision under Section 93 which allows the Garda Commissioner to apply to the District Court to extend the retention period once there is a “good reason” to do so (see O’Briain, 2014: 16). This indicates that removal is restricted to certain instances, and that retention of the information appears to be preferred by the legislation.

To conclude, DNA forms an important part of investigations into criminal activity and missing persons. DNA evidence can be highly useful, but the potential is limited if there is no source with which to compare it. To combat this limitation, DNA database systems have been established in jurisdictions around the world. Ireland has now joined this group by enacting the Criminal Justice (Forensic Evidence and DNA Database System) Act 2014 which governs this area of law.

References

Bieber F. R., (2004) ‘Science and Technology of Forensic DNA Profiling: Current Use and Future Directions’, in DNA and The Criminal Justice System: The Technology of Justice, edited by Lazer D., The MIT Press, Cambridge, pp 23-62.

‘When you know better, you do better’ – Dr. Maya Angelou

Schools are the battleground where inequality can be eradicated and the students’ right to equality can be won. Society can judge its most vulnerable members with a very harsh eye. Nobody wishes to live in poverty, raise their children in poverty and be judged by their peers for the size of their TV, the food on their table and the clothes on their back. Let us imagine that we were all genuinely doing our best with the skills and knowledge that we had, however limited or however bountiful, but accepting that we were nonetheless doing our best. Maya Angelou bestowed many pearls of wisdom upon us, one of which resonates with me daily “When you know better, you do better”. It can be that simple. Schools bring our young people together to educate them; education in its many forms helps us do better.

There is a growing body of literature which explores the influence of school in the lives of young people. Now we know better, let us do better. Let our schools raise our young women and men up from their first steps on their educational journey until they march out the door, heads high armed with the knowledge and power to do better. Sounds lofty? I am a realist, so let’s get practical. Our teachers must teach the curriculum, but in what environment, with what expectations and with how much awareness of “the hidden curriculum”?

Let us explore class inequality first. Research in an Irish context found that irrespective of social background and Leaving Cert grades, young people attending a school with a high concentration of working-class students were much less likely to go on to higher education than those who attended middle-class or socially mixed schools. In Ireland, students from middle-class schools were more likely than those from working-class schools to go on to some form of post-school education and training. It is not the bricks and mortar or the tables and chairs of the school that is creating such an obvious divide. Schools need to examine their culture. Is everyone present because it is compulsory, or because they want to teach and learn and grow and do better? What is the belief system in the school? Do the teachers believe in their students? Do the students believe in themselves? Schools cannot control the messages students are getting in the media, in their neighbourhood or in their homes. They can, however, carefully craft the messages that students receive during their day of learning and they can encourage students to control how they receive positive and negative messages about themselves. What subjects are schools offering? Is the school offering a higher-level option to junior and senior cycle students? Schools which do not offer a European language and higher-level subjects to their students are sending a loaded, negative message to their students: these are not for you. Schools which do not offer and actively encourage students to study higher-level subjects are curbing the future life-chances of their students and need to hold themselves to a higher standard. What types of guidance does a school offer? Research tells us that working-class students and students from ethnic minorities are more heavily reliant on formal guidance in schools for making educational decisions. Does the school have a college-going culture? Are students exposed to different types of pathways? Visibility is crucial when planning post-school pathways. If a student does not know a certain career or profession exists, how can they pursue that pathway? Simple answer: they cannot and so they do not. Instead they follow the familiar pathways that have been worn before them but, no more! Now they will know better and they will do better.

This leads us to the issue of gender inequality. Research suggests that male students achieve more success than female students in co-educational schools. Reasons for this include teachers calling on male students more frequently to answer questions, allow male students to speak over or ‘shout-down’ female students and dominate the discourse. Not only is this further reinforcing gender inequality in the classroom, but it internalises the power structure for females who carry this experience of subordination into higher education and the workplace. Are co-educational and single sex schools fighting gender bias in subject choice? There is a disservice being done to all students by not fostering a culture in which male and female students can actively engage in traditionally highly-gendered subjects. If a school is not challenging gender bias in subject choices the message is clear to students from a very young age. Students make distinctions between what is for them and not for them; thus, their pathways become gendered which is not in the best interests of the students, the school or wider society. Gender inequality damages everyone and stunts our growth as people and as a society.

I attended a single sex school, and I lament the wasted opportunities that a ‘better’ culture and a ‘better’ understanding of our agency in society could have created. There were approximately 700 young women in my school. Can you imagine the change 700 young women could make in the world if they were armed with the tools to tackle inequality in its various forms? Prescribed prose and poetry on the curriculum in my time did not speak to young working-class women and their place in the world, or the power they possess. Geography seemed a somewhat abstract subject, mountains, rivers, and lakes unfamiliar from my own vantage point in a housing estate. And of course, the Leaving Certificate “points race”, a tall-tale of meritocracy, which in reality is run on a two-tier track and never the twain shall meet.

We do a disservice to our young students by not acknowledging the power to create change that they possess. One young person working in isolation to tackle inequality will undoubtedly face an unrelenting path. A school of 700 young people, hungry for more, has the power to create a tsunami of change in their community, to empower their peers to go forth and demand better. Schools must acknowledge their unique position in shaping these future agents of change. Over the course of a lifetime a school has daily access to young people, where they can empower them with the knowledge to create change, consistently reinforce these values and lift their aspirations to previously unimaginable heights.

Let us end on a reflection of the school as the ‘battleground’ where equality can be won. If a school makes it their mission to wage war on inequality, their students will carry this victory with them. Empowered and emboldened by this victory, students can assert their place in society and challenge inequality on a global stage with confidence and eloquence because these students will know better and these students will do better.

The sanctuary of Belfast’s Fitzroy Presbyterian Church buzzed with activity. Friends and neighbours chatted among the dark wooden pews, the columns of the pipe organ soaring high above their heads. The congenial atmosphere felt like the minutes before the start of a church service, save for the Beatles tunes playing softly in the background.

Halfway House

At precisely 7:30, the music stopped, and those assembled fell silent as the lights dimmed and a spotlight focused on the platform in the middle of the sanctuary, turning it into a minimalist theatre stage. A white-haired man walked onto the stage. He introduced himself to us as Philip Orr, the author of Halfway House, the play we had all come to see. He explained that the play is set in 1966, in a snowed-in pub in the Sperrin Mountains. As he described the particular historical setting of the mid-1960s – a time of significant social change in the Western world, and in Northern Ireland the years directly preceding the conflict known as ‘the Troubles’ – the Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ began to play softly, and two women joined him on stage, entering from opposite doors on either side of the platform.
In the course of the next hour, we watched as the two women, Bronagh and Valerie, weathered the snowstorm – of which we were occasionally reminded by an audio clip of a howling winter wind – in conversation with one another, a conversation that ranged from congenial and sympathetic to tense and, at times, openly hostile. We soon learned that one woman is Protestant, the other Catholic; one’s father a veteran of the Easter Rising, the other’s father a veteran of the Battle of the Somme.

Parallels and Contemporary Politics

The essence of the play rests in these parallels: both women grew up in Downpatrick, County Down, but due to the divided nature of the community they have only heard of each other’s families, never met – ‘a question of “same place but separate lives”’, as one of the women puts it (Orr 2016: 5).

Both are equally proud of their respective parents’ brief military service in 1916, and both tell stories of national and familial hurts occasioned by the other ‘side’.

Halfway House[i] capitalized on an important historic concurrence: the close proximity of the Easter Rising (24-29 April 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (1 July-18 November 1916). The Easter Rising is commemorated each year as an important event in the formation of an independent Irish state, and relatedly with the Partition of Ireland. It is associated with an Irish identity, and thus with Catholicism, nationalism, and republicanism. The Battle of the Somme serves as a sort of opposite: it is commemorated as an important event in British history, and is thus associated with British-ness, Protestantism, unionism, and loyalism (see Grayson and McGarry 2016)[ii].
Commemorations serve the present: they harness the past and shape it in ways that suit the commemorators’ present-day needs. As anthropologist Dominic Bryan puts it, ‘The marking of a centenary is an act of contemporary politics… the commemorative practices are constructed in the present, for the present’ (in Bryan et al. 2013: 66).

Female Voices and Cross-Community Dialogue

As part of my Ph.D. research, I look at one particular approach to commemoration, in which artists, particularly those working in community arts, engaged with the dual centenary of the Somme and the Easter Rising in their work. Halfway House is one of my case studies.
I would like to draw out two key projects that such artistic endeavours attempt to accomplish, using Halfway House as an example. First, the play mirrors a wider move toward more inclusive commemorations in Northern Ireland in the twenty-first century. Commemorations that recognize both the Battle of the Somme and the Easter Rising, and the roles of both Catholics and Protestants in each, have become increasingly common (Daly and O’Callaghan 2007: 4; McCarthy 2012: 430-439; Grayson and McGarry 2016: 2-3).

Likewise, Orr’s choice to write women characters reflects a growing desire to include women’s voices in the narratives told during and around commemorations (see Mullally 2016).

While the stories that Valerie and Bronagh tell are still in many ways men’s stories – the stories of their fathers’ involvement in armed conflict, and of their fathers’, brothers’, and uncles’ pride in the respective commemorations – they also speak of the fabric of their everyday lives as women in the Northern Ireland of the 1960s: leaving the workforce after having children, moving to the ‘big city’ of Belfast versus staying at ‘home’ in Downpatrick, caring for elderly relatives, and so forth.

Second, Halfway House represents a desire for increased dialogue, both between individuals and, more widely, between the two main ‘communities’ in Northern Ireland. The two women model ‘good’ dialogue for their audiences: while they may disagree on certain points, they never raise their voices or interrupt each other, and each actively listens and attempts to empathize with her counterpart. They are ultimately respectful of one another, and willing and able to reflect on their own biases. Neither do they shy away from difficult or painful discussions. For example, midway through the play, Bronagh, the Catholic woman, tells Valerie that the Ulster Special Constabulary, known as the ‘“B” Specials’, regularly visit her family’s home to search their barns and house. She reveals a great amount of hurt at this felt invasion of her family’s property and privacy. Shortly after, Valerie hesitantly reveals that her father and uncle both joined the ‘B’ Specials after the war, and we can see her struggling to reconcile her own pride in their service with Bronagh’s experiences of hurt. The following exchange takes place at the end of this telling:

Valerie: But what you also have to realise, Bronagh, was the fear, back then. Uncle Joe still says you could have cut it with a knife.

Bronagh: The town was miles away from the riots in Belfast and it was miles from the border.

Valerie: But we were afraid.

Bronagh: Afraid of whom?

Valerie: Afraid of you. (Orr 2016:22)

Tellingly to the play’s project, the two characters have an equal number of spoken lines, so that neither dominates the dramatic action or dialogue. One reviewer commented on this phenomenon of ‘good’ dialogue, and the way in which it encouraged the audience to participate in similar conversations, writing that ‘the quality of listening on stage was echoed in the venue’s café afterwards as people sat round and discussed the play over a cup of coffee’ (Meban 2016).

A Major Shift: Re-Imagining the ‘Other’

This approach to cross-community dialogue in theatre evidences an important shift in the past thirty or so years. Take, for example, Frank McGuinness’s (1986) play Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme, which dramatizes the journey of eight (fictional) Protestant, Northern Ireland-born World War I soldiers to the Battle of the Somme[iii]. McGuinness, born in County Donegal and hailing from an Irish Catholic background, famously drew his inspiration for this play from living for the first time in a majority Protestant community, while teaching at the (then) New University of Ulster in Coleraine. Grene (1999: 242-245) considers Observe the Sons an exercise in ‘imagining the other’ and encouraging audiences to do the same, as ‘[f]or southern Catholic nationalists Ulster Protestant Unionism is as other as you can get … The play represents therefore a new sort of imaginative reaching out in Irish drama’. Lojek (2004: 77-79) similarly notes that in both the play’s premiere and each of its subsequent stage revivals, Observe the Sons has been heralded as ‘an icon of cross-cultural understanding’, and ‘an indication of increased understanding by Irish Catholics that Irish Protestantism is also part of the island’s culture and heritage’.

What is particularly interesting is the major shift that can be seen between the type of imagining undertaken in Observe the Sons and that found in Halfway House. In the former, the playwright imagines the community that is ‘other’ to him, probing its trauma and writing from a place of empathy. It is indeed a type of dialogue, but much of the work of dialogue is implicit, having already taken place in the experiences of the playwright, though of course as spectators or readers we can choose to dialogue with the play’s material ourselves. In Halfway House, however, the dialogue is physically presented on stage. While we can, of course, choose not to engage with the material in an inner dialogue of our own, we cannot sidestep the fact of the dialogue itself, as it forms the very substance of the play. This great shift, then, is one from ‘imagining the other’ to imagining ways in which oneself – or someone very like oneself – might encounter the other in an everyday situation such as a snowbound pub.

—

[i] Halfway House and its companion play, Stormont House Rules!, were commissioned by evangelical Christian organization Contemporary Christianity as part of a project entitled ‘1916, a Hundred Years On’ (see Contemporary Christianity n.d.).

[ii] Of course, individual identities do not fall so neatly into these two categories, and plenty of residents of Northern Ireland, including its growing migrant population, do not consider themselves part of either the Protestant community or the Catholic community.

[iii] Dublin’s Abbey Theatre staged Observe the Sons of Ulster as part of its 2016 centenary commemoration programme. This production was staged at Belfast’s Lyric Theatre in early July 2016, around the time of the local commemorations of the Battle of the Somme (1 July) and the Battle of the Boyne (12 July) (see Coyle 2016, Hardy 2016).

My PhD is part of a five year research project entitled ‘Local Health Inequalities in an Age of Austerity: The Stockton-on-Tees study’. It’s a mixed method case study exploring the localised impacts of austerity on health. My role is examining the experiences of women living in Stockton using qualitative research.

A few key terms

Austerity refers to attempts to reduce government deficits through spending cuts and sometimes tax increases. Across Europe, austerity was implemented in many countries, such as Greece and Ireland, as a precondition of receiving bailouts in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008. In the UK, a major restructuring of the public sector and welfare system has been undertaken since 2010.

Neoliberalism refers to the application of free market principles to public policy. It has been enacted in the UK since Thatcher’s Conservative government came to power in the 1980s and has comprised of deregulation (e.g. of the banking and financial system), privatisation (e.g. of bus and rail services) and, more recently, austerity (e.g. extensive welfare reforms).

‘Health inequalities’ refer to disparities in life expectancy and years of health life (‘mortality’ and ‘morbidity’) within and across nations. There is a gradient in all countries – those with more socio-economic resources also have better health (Marmot, 2010). In the UK, health inequalities are widening since austerity began. Schrecker and Bambra (2015) have referred to the process of widening health inequalities and liberalised economic and social policies as a ‘neoliberal epidemic’.

Austerity and inequality in the UK

The UK is a large country, and one of great social contrasts. The contrasts that are relevant to my research are related to inequality of opportunity, resources, health, and the government policies, political decisions and historical legacies that bring these about. The North East has experienced a huge restructuring of its’ social landscape in recent decades. Mining, heavy industry and manufacturing have all but ceased to operate there. The jobs that once provided decent incomes and rooted people to their communities, providing clear routes through the lifecourse and class allegiances, have slipped away. In their place are zero hour contracts in care homes and nurseries, seasonal work in factories and as agency staff providing security in shopping centres.

Through this research process I have tried to understand what neoliberalism and austerity feel like if you’re not on the winning side of them, focussing on gender and class. I’ve then tried to see the wider connection to globalised economies and deregulated financial markets.

Stockton-on-Tees

One of the ways austerity is affecting places and people differently is through health. In Stockton-on-Tees, the gap in life expectancy for men is the largest in all of England, at 17.3 years, and one of the widest for women, at 11.4 (Public Health England, 2015). If you are a man born in one of the wealthier, typically less urbanised parts of Stockton you can expect, on average, to live 17.3 years longer, and more of those years in good health, than a man born just a short walk away, in a more built-up and less well-off part of town. You are also at a higher risk of cardio-vascular disease, obesity, cancer, mental health issues, suicide, alcoholism, to be more socially isolated, have a worse paying, precarious job or no job at all, and to be at the mercy of an increasingly retrenched welfare state for your income and livelihood. The picture for women is similar, but different in crucial ways I will explore later.

This, of course, isn’t the picture for everyone in Stockton; I don’t want to paint a doomsday caricature (Benefits Street, the Channel 4 show, made a noble attempt at that in 2014 with their ‘poverty porn’ foray into life on Kingston Road). Stockton is steeped in a proud industrial legacy, is surrounded by beautiful dales and hills, has a vibrant town centre, and is home to thousands of people of all kinds who are creating thriving and enduring communities. Undeniably, however, government policy is making the lives of an increasing number of its residents tougher.

The research topic

Women face a distinct set of risks under austerity, as their lives, choices and opportunities often play out differently. This led me to develop my research project, to be carried out with mothers from across the borough. I wanted to understand what the experiences are of being a woman living in a place like Stockton – what can they tell us about other similar places that have experienced stark deindustrialisation and withdrawal of resources and traditional routes to employment and social stability? What does it feel like to live through welfare reform, as a mother, with enough money or very little, in an area with lots of different inequalities?

The methods

The research design was informed by the work of Sociologists who have used their skills to bring to the academic and policy world narratives that are otherwise silenced – quite often the voices of women. Berverley Skeggs (1997), wrote about class and gender and respectability in an area of England not so far from Stockton, Ann Oakley (1979; 1993) spent years with mothers asking them what they thought about housework, women’s health and becoming a mother, and Arlie Hochschild (1989) delved into the lives of women trapped in the double- or triple-bind of work, caring for children and elderly relatives. The methods I used are similar to theirs, and ‘qualitative’, meaning they are designed to explore diverse social worlds and understand why certain groups of people or individuals make choices or live in certain ways, or why their lives are presented in a certain light. I had a methodology (system of methods) and sampling strategy (idea of why I wanted to contact, and why). Unlike some quantitative social research or scientific experiment, or the research wasn’t designed with representativeness or generalisability in mind.

I used ethnography, or participant observation; I spent 16 months at a women’s group where I gained friends and mentors and learned about being woman living on a low income in Stockton. I also interviewed 15 women, 14 of whom are mothers, from a wide variety of socio-economic backgrounds and from many different walks of life. I recruited participants through the local Sure Start centres, Twitter, Thrive, the anti-poverty charity I spent a lot of time at, and through snowball sampling (asking people I met if they could recommend someone, or pass on my details). I offered a voucher as a thank-you and recorded my interviews.

Some findings

Continuing austerity and the decline of opportunities: For respondents and their wider networks, there is a huge concern about the likely continuation of austerity and what that might mean for families and communities. We spoke about diminishing opportunity and prospects, the long-term decline of services, the quality and availability of housing and work in the area.

The desire to ‘just be a mam’: Respondents found their roles as mothers and carers increasingly devalued, with the expectation that caring work should be provided by the market and that they should seek formal work as a primary source of income. However, quality work is unavailable, childcare unaffordable, and an important source of identity formation, their role as carers and mothers, diminished under austerity.

Mental health: It became increasingly obvious as I spent more time in the field that the deterioration of participants’ mental health and sense of wellbeing was stark. Discussions of everyday struggles with depression, anxiety and serious bouts of post-natal depression were worryingly frequent. Furthermore, long-term physical health and chronic pain issues were part and parcel of life for many of the women I spent time with, symptoms of a lifetime of stress, poor quality housing and other inequalities (Mattheys et al. 2015).

Conclusion

Underpinning my research is the understanding that women, particularly mothers, face a set of distinct risks under austerity, through labour market changes, reliance on the welfare system and the public sector. They are employed in higher numbers in the public sector, and so more vulnerable to job losses there, and more likely to be underemployed or in low-paid work in ‘feminised’ sectors. They may also face maternity discrimination in their workplace, experience a large gender pay gap and are absent from the labour market for extended periods while they take care of young children. Women also make use of public sector services in high numbers, the very services being cut back during austerity. They rely on the welfare state for many reasons to a much larger extent than men. Welfare reforms like the benefit cap, bedroom tax and sanctions, closures of community centres and privatisation of Sure Starts and lone parent conditionality hit not just women in large numbers, but children and families too. This research is trying to illustrate how austerity is regressive and contributing to growing inequality, and how this group, like many all around the UK, are finding it a challenging time to live through.

References

Blyth, M. 2013. Austerity: the history of a dangerous idea. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hochschild, A. 1989. The Second Shift: working parents and the revolution at home. Viking Penguin, New York.

Robson, S., and Robinson., J., 2012. Findings and recommendations from interim case study: the impact of austerity measures upon women in the North East of England. The Women’s Resource Centre, London.

Recognition and power: gender variance in international law

Walking home with a friend a few nights ago, we fell into a conversation about monsters. My friend, Dr Nicola Moffat[1], had written her PhD thesis on representations of monsters in English literature. Pointing out that the word ‘monster’ derives from the same roots as ‘demonstrate’, she told me that the character that is called a monster is not so much in itself a negative force, but a signifier of something which cannot be understood and named. It is not for nothing that women, pregnancy, and babies are often involved in monster myths – forces misunderstood and even feared by the authors of literature and history becoming vilified and associated with the breakdown of order.

Now, I am not working on literature, on symbolism, or on anything quite so diverting. I’m an international human rights law researcher and I work on issues around gender and sexuality. My conversation with Nicola has remained fresh in my mind because over the course of my studies, I have come to think of law as existing somewhere between a language and a worldview. In many ways, identities legible to the law are conferred recognition and therefore power[2], while identities, lives, and bodies which the law does not comprehend tend to be marginalised and rendered alienated from society. The delegitimisation and demonising of states that cannot be easily understood seems to be as much a part of modern legal systems as it was to writers and artists making up the literary canon. The problem is not the groups being alienated. The problem is the forces which enable this alienation.

Gender recognition, law, and the sociopolitical question

My PhD research focuses on attitudes toward, and frameworks for, the legal recognition of gender variance in international human rights law. I study the manner in which the international human rights institutions, such as the United Nations Treaty Bodies and Special Procedures and the regional Courts of Human Rights, approach issues around gender identity and legal gender recognition. My work also includes case studies on the situation of gender-variant persons in Ireland and India, in order to demonstrate the effects of globalised human rights discourse on domestic legal systems.

What seems to be a straightforward question of law – can a person legally change the gender on their identity documents in this jurisdiction? – is in fact a sociopolitical question of much complexity, involving religion, history, social dynamics, and the relationship between postcolonial societies and the international community. This relationship is a reciprocal exchange of attitudes of permissiveness or repression, complicating the functioning of legal systems on both the national and the international levels.

Legal gender recognition is the facility offered to persons, whose inner and deeply-felt gender identity[3] does not correspond to the sex assigned to them at birth, to change the gender marker on their identity documents such as birth certificate, passport, or driver’s licence. The inability to perform such a change infringes on the individual’s right to autonomy and to free expression, forcing them into a position where they must either present documentation which does not correspond to their gender expression, or to refrain from presenting in the manner which most reflects their gender identity every time they must interact with social institutions.

In many jurisdictions, it is possible to have one’s documents changed via legal or administrative processes, albeit with conditions attached. In all but a handful of jurisdictions[4], the choices of gender marker available are solely the binary options of male or female. The legal gender recognition process also almost universally operates under a set of medical or legal gatekeeping procedures, which I will discuss in more detail below.

In referring to the population of persons with a gender identity incongruous with that which they were assigned at birth, I use the terms ‘gender-variant’ for an individual and ‘gender-diverse’ for a population. The term ‘gender non-conforming’ is also in use. Although in this jurisdiction the term ‘transgender’ is the one most commonly applied to the group, from a global view ‘transgender’ is a Western construct which may not correspond to the subtle categories of identities which can vary from culture to culture. Gender-variant, gender-nonconforming, and trans*/trans are terms which allow for the recognition of binary identified male or female persons; non-binary, third-gender, or genderqueer persons; and hijras, berdaches, fa’afafine, and other culturally specific forms of gender diversity.

Gender recognition in Ireland

In Ireland, gender recognition procedures are governed by the Gender Recognition Act 2015. This Act allows for adults to apply for the issuance of a Gender Recognition Certificate from the Office of the Registrar General granting them legal status in the correct gender. A minor aged sixteen or seventeen may make such an application with the consent of their parent or guardian. The application is made on a basis of self-declaration, meaning that there is no medical or psychological evaluation required to determine the person’s gender-variant status before qualification for a Certificate. This principle ranks Ireland among the most progressive European nations in the field of gender recognition[5], as most other Council of Europe members requires medical or psychological certification or intervention before a person’s gender marker can be changed.

The Act also requires that a review of the law be undertaken in 2017. Among the issues which will be raised this year are the lack of recognition for persons of non-binary gender identities, and the lack of facilities for persons under sixteen to apply for legal gender recognition.

The relative ease with which the GRA 2015 functions belies the two decade-long struggle to enact such a legislation in Ireland, which before the signing of the GRA 2015 had no facility for legal gender recognition in any form. A lengthy campaign of pressure and public-interest litigation from Dr Lydia Foy, along with a fortuitously timed decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Goodwin and I v United Kingdom[6], allowed for a the 2007 High Court decision in Foy v An t-Ard Chláraitheoir 2[7], wherein Mr Justice McKechnie held that the Irish government’s failure to allow Dr Foy to change her gender markers on documentation was incompatible with Ireland’s obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights. This ruling was the catalyst for the ensuing lobbying by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland (TENI) to ensure a strong and human rights-compliant legal gender recognition protocol for Ireland.

Gender recognition in international human rights law

Since the early 2000s, gender recognition has steadily been gaining status in mainstream international human rights law. The 2002 Goodwin and I decision was the first to find in favour of a transgender applicant in the European context, and sparked a series of legal reforms across the continent (including the UK’s Gender Recognition Act 2004). The emergence of gender identity as a concern of the United Nations human rights mechanisms began in 2006 with the Joint Statement on Human Rights Violations based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity before the Human Rights Council. In 2007, the signing of the non-binding but influential Yogyakarta Principles[8] marked the first declaration of the human rights of persons of diverse gender identities. Since then, the United Nations human rights bodies, such as the Human Rights Committee[9] and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women[10], have also begun to include the situation of gender-variant persons in their member states during their review procedures.

It is clear that legal gender recognition can confer many benefits on the potential applicant. Without identification documents in the gender corresponding to that in which a person is presenting, access to education, employment, and travel becomes increasingly limited. In order to cross a national border, apply for social benefits, or access healthcare services, they must ‘out’ themselves and risk facing a potentially hostile response. Although sometimes critiqued as conferring mostly formal equality on gender-variant persons[11], availability or lack thereof in relation to legal gender recognition has a marked effect on the substantive equality of the gender-variant individual in society.

Legal recognition also renders gender-variant persons more legible to the institutions of state and, in turn, to society at large. Owning a body which deviates from the normative gender standards imposed by society places the gender-variant person in a vulnerable position, making it more difficult to secure their status, health, and well-being. Western – by which I mean Euro-/Ameri-centric – societies and legal systems are built on binary understandings of gender. This choice of male or female maps gender directly onto sex, and includes a biological determinist viewpoint wherein the shape of one’s body must dictate how one’s mind conforms to societal gender norms. Theorists such as Butler have described how gender is not predicated on physical traits in this manner; it is a continual performance of acts and manners of expression, less something one is than something one does. Furthermore, the social construct of gender is complex enough that no person conforms perfectly to all expected gender norms at a given time. Logically followed through, this incomplete performance means that, as Butler states, “those permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of gender as its most normative instance”[12].

Legal recognition and societal legitimacy

What impact does this have on legal systems? A system built on a binary lacks space for the grey areas of gender, the non-conforming permutations. Recognition confers power; legal recognition confers status. The law is a system of power dynamics. It creates categories which become, themselves, constituent of identities. In many jurisdictions, for example, it is necessary for a person seeking legal gender recognition to produce medical certification of their gender variance. The requirements for certification can include confirmation that the person has undergone surgical intervention; references from a psychiatrist or psychologist that the person is suffering from “gender dysphoria”, or the medicalised formulation of gender non-conformity; or records of how long the person has been “living in their gender”. For many gender-variant persons, these can be difficult to obtain or mean that they must adjust their presentation or gender expression in order to comply.

Even though the object of these laws is to liberate gender-variant persons from repression, they often internally demand compliance with other norms. For example, in many instances where the law recognises the existence and legitimacy of binary-identified gender-variant persons, those identifying outside the binary, or presenting in a way which is not recognisable to the legal and medical gatekeepers regulating access to recognition find themselves in a difficult position. Lacking recognition by the law means lacking the protection of the law. Marginalised gender-variant persons are more likely to be the subject of discrimination, exclusion, and violence. There is a reciprocal relationship between legal recognition and societal legitimacy: the doors to societal acceptance often depend on one’s legal status, while legal status depends to a large extent on the views of society and lawmakers.

With this in mind, I find it necessary to problematise the human rights law system as it currently stands. To use a phrase gifted to me by the work of another friend, it is important to look at the “decisions of silence”[13] in the language used by law. The question which needs to be applied to emerging frameworks of legal gender recognition is not solely “which groups are being recognised by this law?”, but equally “which groups are not?”. In Ireland, despite our progressive legislation and the greater societal acceptance of the lives of gender-variant persons which have come with it, for the non-binary person seeking recognition it is as if the law has moved no further than it had before the signing of the 2015 Act.

The ‘T’ in ‘LGBT’ should not be silent

In another facet of this area of law which merits examination, there is a tendency for human rights law to refer to the issues concerning gender-variant persons and non-heterosexual persons as a monolithic category under the heading ‘LGBT issues’. This not only erases the spectrums of identity in those communities, but it risks assuming that the same reforms are needed by both. For example, it is often more pressing for gender-variant persons that healthcare be available on an equal basis than for non-heterosexual persons; equally, the right to marriage equality and to start a family is often very welcome to gender-variant persons, but there is still a fundamental lacuna in their recognition if they cannot obtain a correct set of identity documents. My research has shown that this is a persistent problem from the level of grassroots organisations right up to the international human rights bodies such as the United Nations Treaty Bodies and Special Procedures[14]. As many trans* activists state: the “T” in “LGBT” should not be silent.

I believe in law, written in a human rights-compliant manner, as a mechanism for social change. However, even with advances in the law, gender variance continues to be misunderstood by society. The scaremongering recently seen over the right of transgender persons to use the bathroom corresponding to their gender is evidence of this. Lawmakers in the United States have even introduced legislation banning transgender persons from using a bathroom other than the one which corresponds to the gender on their birth certificate[15], citing a fear for the safety of the cisgender persons also using that restroom.

This brings us back to my thoughts on my friend’s thesis about literary monsters and other various folk devils. Gender-variant persons suffer delegitimisation on many fronts: facing hostility from medical professionals, discrimination in the workplace, the threat of violence, a much higher incidence of socioeconomic disadvantage. Much of this comes down to the vision of the gender-nonconforming body and mind as Other, and the mistrust of that Other. Legal recognition is only one part of the process of demystifying gender variance.

Gender norms are a deeply inbuilt factor in society. They can be used as a form of control; as Foucault stated, ““the norm is something that can be applied both to a body one wishes to discipline and a population one wishes to regularise”. The gender-variant person sometimes seems to appear to lawmakers as an entity to be normalised, regulated, and by naming and recognised, understood. It is the task of human rights lawyers to challenge that viewpoint and to represent gender-variant persons as fully formed rights-bearing subjects; to listen to the voices of the community, and to litigate and legislate according to their wishes.

It would be wonderful to have a conversation about literature and not see in it the manner in which legislators and the public continue to pretend that Otherness is invisible or wrong. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. In the language of fiction, it is possible to represent unknowns by demonising and marginalising them. In the language of law, however, it is vital that we understand that the unknown quantities we discuss are people’s lives, livelihoods, and human rights. We have to challenge the viewpoint that any group of people should be alienated from their rights, and to stand for justice beyond the vagaries of popular opinion – particularly in these frightened and frightening times in which we find ourselves living.

References

[1] If you want to learn more, Dr Moffat blogs at monsterivity.wordpress.com and is @NicolaMoffat on Twitter.

[5] For a global survey on the requirements for gender recognition across jurisdictions, please see ILGA’s Trans Legal Mapping Report: Recognition Before the Law (2016; Chiam, Z., Duffy, S., and Gil, M.G.).

[9] First mention of gender recognition law came in the 2008 review of Ireland, at CCPR/C/IRL/CO/3; the Committee has made other observations such as in its 2011 review of Kuwait, on offences of “wearing the clothing of the other gender”, CCPR/C/KWT/CO/2, paragraph 30.

[10] For example, General Recommendation 33, on women’s access to justice; Concluding Observations from reviews such as that of the Netherlands, at CEDAW/C/NLD/CO/5.

[11] The work of transgender legal theorist Dean Spade problematises the system of gender classification in its entirety.

5.4 million people in the UK have asthma, and every ten seconds, someone in the UK has a potentially life-threatening asthma attack. On average, three people a day die from an asthma attack in the UK – in 2014 (the most recent data available), 1216 people died from asthma. Many of these deaths are preventable, and continued use of asthma medication is an important factor in this (Asthma UK, 2017). But many people don’t stick to their asthma medication routines. Kathy Hetherington writes about her research into a new method of asthma treatment which is significantly reducing the risks associated with severe asthma.

My PhD investigates patient’s response to inhaled steroids using novel monitoring technology. I have spent the past year coordinating this project throughout the UK, within the Refractory Asthma Stratification Programme-UK, (RASP-UK). I work alongside Professor Liam Heaney and Professor Judy Bradley in Queen’s University, and Professor Richard Costello in the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland. As a young researcher in Northern Ireland I am excited in the knowledge that my PhD has the potential to improve future asthma care.

The Problem

Many asthmatics do not use their inhalers correctly. As a result, they don’t receive their prescribed dosage of inhaled steroid. Within Queen’s University Belfast and the Belfast City Hospital, we have developed and implemented a new method of observing and monitoring how patients use their inhalers. This revelation is significantly reducing the risks associated with severe asthma.

In RASP-UK severe asthma centres we record Fractional exhaled Nitric Oxide (FeNO), which is a measure of lung inflammation. An elevated FeNO is a predictor of worsening asthma symptoms or even an asthma attack. Those who continue to have an elevated FeNO are usually considered high-risk patients who need daily oral steroids alongside their inhalers. This elevated FeNO could be due to steroid resistance, or not continuing to use their inhaler (this is known as non-adherence). Determining inhaled steroid response in a difficult asthma population is a major problem in a clinical setting.

The Intervention

Within RASP-UK, we have established and further validated a clinical test using daily FeNO measurements (using a Niox Vero machine – Figure 2) alongside some additional inhaled steroid. The remote monitoring technology we use alongside this test is called an INCA™ (INhaled Compliance Aid) device. The INCA™ (Figure 1) was developed by Professor Richard Costello in conjunction with Vitalograph and is designed to work with the diskus inhaler. The INCA™ device records a time and date when the microphone inside it is activated, and records a sound file of the inhaler being used; these sound files can then be transferred to a computer. The sound files are then uploaded onto a server via a data compression utility programme where it is analysed by an automated and validated sound analysis algorithm. This combination allows us to create a remote assessment of inhaled steroid response and thus identify non-adherence to inhalers. We then communicate this information to the patients to try and improve their adherence to their inhaled treatment.

Inhaler with INCA™ device attached

Niox Vero (measures lung inflammation – FeNO)

With further development, we created a web-based interface (Figure 3) to deploy FeNO suppression testing across the UK though our established RASP-UK Severe Asthma Centres. Here, we examined the utility of FeNO suppression testing to predict inhaled steroid responsiveness after a further 30 days on a normal inhaler. This period of prolonged monitoring provides further feedback on patient inhaler use and technique, using the unique presentation method below, enabling us to identify facilitators and barriers which may be involved in optimising inhaler adherence. We are constantly increasing the precision and user-friendliness of this hardware and software so that the data is easily interpreted and demonstrated to the patient.

Figure 3 Data from the Vitalograph server following upload of one week FeNO suppression data and INCA™. The Vitalograph server shows activation and usage of both FeNO machine and INCA™ device (A) and depicts the FeNO data as precentage change from baseline as originally described (y1-aixs figure A). The INCA™ device time and date stamps the number of inhaler uses (y2-axis – Figure A) and this is shown alongside technique analysis (B). Possible technique errors which can be identified and reported are shown in Graphic 3.

The Future

Though we are only a year into our project, 250 patients in severe asthma centres throughout the UK have carried out FeNO suppression testing. Many have gone on to improve their inhaler usage and asthma control and decrease the inflammation in their lungs. We have presented our UK multi-centre data at conferences all over the world and interest in our project is increasing. In the past 6 months I have had the privilege of being a key note speaker at Severe Asthma Masterclasses and Specialist Asthma Meetings. This summer I have been invited as a symposium speaker at the European Academy of Allergy & Clinical Immunology in Helsinki, Finland which will undoubtedly be the highlight of my career to date!

My PhD has given me the opportunity to be able to work with a wide range of fantastic professors, clinicians, patients and co-ordinators. This PhD has convinced me that we can use this unique test and methods of presentation to improve asthma care throughout the world. I can’t express how much this thought excites and drives me; it is with great humility and privilege that I will continue to contribute to this extraordinary field.

Former Irish President Mary Robinson (left) and Ethiopia’s Hiroute Guebre Sellasie, the UN’s only female lead mediators

In his December 2016 inauguration speech, the newly elected Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), former Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Guetterres, indicated that one of the priorities of his term in office would be conflict prevention. He emphasised the need to take more creative approaches to prevent the escalation of conflict, including notably a much stronger emphasis on the use of mediation and creative diplomacy. Prevention, it is said, is better than cure, particularly when conflicts such as Syria, Yemen, South Sudan and Israel/Palestine are proving so difficult to ‘cure’. The emphasis on mediation marks the culmination of a longer process of review within the UN of the ways it responds to violent conflict. A series of reports evaluating the UN’s peacebuilding architecture led to the 2016 adoption of the ‘Sustaining Peace Agenda’, marking a commitment to increased coherence across the organisation in co-ordinating peacebuilding activities.[1] Resolution 2282 (2016) emphasises ‘the importance of a comprehensive approach to sustaining peace, particularly through the prevention of conflict and addressing its root causes, […] and promoting […] inclusive dialogue and mediation…’

This priority is also accompanied by a commitment by the new Secretary General to address a persistent problem within the UN – the need to ensure gender parity.

Resolution 2282 reaffirms the importance of women’s participation in peace and security, as well as stressing the importance of increasing women’s leadership and decision-making in relation to conflict prevention. The bringing together of these two priorities, namely an increased role for mediation in international peace and security and a commitment to increasing the participation of women in leadership roles within the UN, presents a good opportunity to consider the role of women in conflict mediation.

Of course, a commitment to increasing women’s participation in conflict prevention and peacebuilding is not new. Since the Security Council passed its landmark Resolution 1325 in 2000, the role of women in conflict resolution and peacebuilding has been on the Security Council agenda. The ‘Women, Peace and Security Agenda’ has consistently highlighted the underrepresentation of women in peacebuilding and a number of strategies have been implemented to try and redress this imbalance. There is a very significant body of work on the reasons that women should be included in peacebuilding. This work has highlighted the benefits of including women and has highlighted the different roles that women play within peacebuilding,[2] however it has largely overlooked the specific category of women in the role of mediator. This is despite clear policy commitments throughout the WPS resolutions that call for greater representation of women within high-level UN mediation teams.[3] And yet, despite over 10 years work on the WPS agenda, the number of women actively included in peace talks as mediators remains persistently low. Research shows that, of 31 UN-led mediation processes between 1991 and 2011, only 3 were led by women as the chief mediator. This translates into only 2.7 % of all chief mediators.[4] As a result in 2013 the Security Council passed resolution 2122 further requesting the Secretary General to support the appointments of women at senior levels as UN mediators and within the composition of UN mediation teams. By 2014 the UN had appointed two female lead mediators – the former Irish president Mary Robinson, and Hiroute Guebre Sellasie of Ethiopia – and women held a further 14% of senior UN mediation positions.[5] However this figure remains low in light of the Secretary General’s 2010 commitment to increasing the number of women appointed to lead UN peace processes.[6]

The very low statistics of women in the role of chief UN mediator creates an impression that women are simply not engaged in the mediation of violent conflict. Yet, in practice, we know this is not true.

In conflicted states across the globe women are actively involved in the mediation of violent conflict. The roles they play are increasingly being recognised through the creation of networks of women mediators such as those created by Nordic States, by African States, and in support of the peace process in Colombia. So why, when women are so active in mediation at the local level, do we not see more women in high level UN led processes? My research suggests a number of reasons for this apparent contradiction.

Responsibility for increasing the participation of women in mediation is divided across different departments within the UN. The appointment of high-level envoys or Special Representatives of the Secretary General – those we all recognise as the public face of UN-led mediation – lies with the Department of Political Affairs. The appointment of a mediator in this context refers specifically to the appointment of an individual by the Secretary General to pursue conflict diplomacy on his behalf. These are high-level political appointments and are almost exclusively at the discretion of the Secretary General himself. The Envoy will be the person responsible for convening the Track I – or state-level- talks. Women are very under-represented in these positions.

This focus on high-level talks and on the leadership role of international mediators can be contrasted with the approach taken by UN Women, the body tasked with working with member states to further the empowerment of women and support peacebuilding capacity within the State. At this level, mediation happens at a local level, within and between communities. It is at this level that women mediators are most strongly represented.[7] Women are regarded as bringing significant skills to mediation not only while official Track I processes are happening, but before and after those processes, in some cases enabling the process to take place. Through their roles as intermediaries women can create the conditions whereby talks are possible, for example by negotiating the cessation of hostilities to allow humanitarian access or opening channels for dialogue.[8]

The division of responsibility between the DPA and UN Women, both of which have very different operational mandates, creates a potential gap between mediation in local or national contexts and mediation that occurs at the international level. While women may demonstrate strong mediation skills and have considerable experience of mediating disputes, this experience does not result in inclusion in international mediation teams. There is a point at which women mediators tend to drop out of peace talks, and this is the point at which international actors become involved. At this stage, women are not considered to be ‘political’ enough to want to play a role in high-level mediation.

In these circumstances, women’s local experience is often overlooked in favour of bringing in international experts (who may also be women) to consult on the design and delivery of mediation processes. This means that not only do local women become marginalised in the process, but their insight into the conflict dynamics is also lost.

When women return to the process they return in the role of participants in the process—as a vulnerable group to be consulted rather than as the agents of change they have been. Further, the extent of women’s participation is also largely dependent on how willing the mediator is to include them,[9] leaving women inherently vulnerable to exclusion.

Of course not all women who engage in mediation at the community level will seek international opportunities. Similarly, there may be local gender dynamics that make it difficult for local women to step into political positions. But it is patronising to suggest that all women mediators are satisfied with working at the local level. Many have the skill, the experience and the ambition to play greater roles internationally. What is missing is a route to integrate them into formal processes.[10] While the role of Envoy will always be available only to a very small category of people, there is no reason that women should not play more prominent roles within high-level mediation teams.

There may be a very practical reason for the failure of women mediators to make the transition from local or national experience to international experience. It may simply be, for example, that they are not coming to the attention of the DPA at the time at which mediation teams are being selected. Member States therefore have a role to play in the career development and the nomination of women for inclusion within UN teams. If the DPA relies on nominations from Member States for identifying suitable candidates, then States can potentially support the work of both UN Women and the DPA by bridging the gap between the local and the global. This would include identifying women working as mediators within the community sector, the private sector as well as the Women’s sector, thereby casting the net much wider than traditional approaches. It would involve recognising the contribution that women mediators are already making to conflict resolution.

Taking a proactive approach to identifying women mediators, and ensuring that they benefit from the necessary career development opportunities at the national level, would be a big step towards a more coherent approach to ensuring that women’s contribution to mediation is made visible internationally.

Taking such an approach is consistent with the Sustaining Peace Agenda and speaks directly to the need for greater synergy between the relevant agencies responsible for sustaining peace and promoting gender parity.

Gender and terror – woman first, fighter second?

As acts of political violence flood local and international news media outlets, it is imperative that academic study scrutinises, and if necessary, challenges, these news media representations. For the majority of people watching, listening to, or reading the news, these representations are the only information that they will receive. Hence, the content of these portrayals and how they are produced, have a significant impact on news consumers’ ideologies and understandings of political violence.

What is more, violence (and most threats to security) are deemed a primarily male domain. Women’s involvement in political violence jars with this ‘masculine endeavour. Women who commit acts of political violence are not depicted simply as combatants, freedom fighters or terrorists, but their representations in the news media are gendered. The terms female combatant/freedom fighter/terrorist are pregnant with gendering, as not only does the adjective ‘female’ come before combatant/freedom fighter/terrorist, which highlights her gender before her actions, but the fact that her gender must be qualified speaks volumes about the palatability of women engaging in political violence.

As the news media have a significant role in mirroring, creating and perpetuating social norms, the consequences of this is that the categories of representation can be adopted by news consumers and repeated and reiterated through dialogue and socialisation. The news media may be guilty of underpinning, rather than confronting, the dominant patriarchal culture and subsequently participating in women’s marginalisation in public life.

In society, women are generally defined by traditional gender roles, and these narratives are picked up by the news media and bolstered by repeated depiction. In the news media, women are still depicted using a formula of gendered accounts, especially with a focus on appearance. For example, hits in Google for Amal Clooney are blogs dedicated to her fashion sense. Unfortunately, her impeccable style looms large over her career as a barrister at Doughty Street Chambers. Moreover, Michelle Obama is as well-known for her clothes (Weaver, 2017) as she is for her campaign for female education. Although there is nothing fundamentally wrong with referring to someone’s clothes, when this becomes the be all and end all of a person’s characterisation this is where it is detrimental to women’s equality. If women’s news media portrayal is distilled down to an outfit, this constrains women’s roles to one-dimensional symbols of beauty rather than as figures of change.

This is particularly notable with regards to female combatants, as their acts of political violence are also framed by gender constructions. For example, the online New York Post’s headline ‘She’s Beautiful and She’s an Alleged ISIS Terrorist’ (Rosenbaum, 2015) gives the impression of puzzlement. Why would a beautiful woman choose to be a terrorist as surely her beauty could have been better spent elsewhere?! The currency (and commodity) of beauty is a valuable and looked-for bargaining chip in society, “[t]hey call her the ‘beautiful terrorist with a Mona Lisa smile’ and she’s as wanted as any work by Leonardo da Vinci”(Rosenbaum, 2015). The choice of the word “wanted” alludes to her being sought by authorities for terrorist offences, but also wanted as in desired sexually. The portrayal of her appearance and associated sexuality have overshadowed her political activism, and the fact that the allusion to her looks precedes her occupation underscores the notion that her appearance is more important than her political agency.

Furthermore, the interview of Viner (2001) and Leila Khaled of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) is saturated with gendered connotations: “international pin-up”; “the gun held in fragile hands, the shiny hair wrapped in a keffiah, the delicate Audrey Hepburn face refusing to meet your eye”; “Her cheekbones are still like knives; her eyes are gentle but flicker when moved”. This effusively gendered account of Khaled champions her appearance over her acts of political violence in 1960s and 70s. The oxymoron of the ‘beautiful terrorist’ suggests an uneasiness as beauty and terror are conflated. The paradoxes of sharp cheekbones as signifiers of attractiveness and knives as deadly weapons, and of delicate hands holding lethal arms, are difficult to reconcile. On the one hand, the female combatant is aesthetically pleasing by adhering to the accepted norms of beauty, however, on the other hand, her beauty is balanced with the ugly acts of terrorists. It is challenging to negotiate and navigate between the two notions in the news media. Therefore, in order to acquaint the female terrorist with the news consumer, familiar frameworks of understanding are utilised.

One such framework is the theme of hypersexuality. The Independent.ie calls Idoia Lopez Riano “the seductress ‘Tigresa’ lost her lust for killing” (Govan, 2011a) that alludes to her sexuality and female libidinousness which portrays her as a lascivious profligate. Frequently, female sexuality is referenced to undermine a woman’s credibility and ability. Moreover, an ‘oversexed’ woman is portrayed as having aberrant sexuality which has led her to murder, rather than a conscious and deliberate choice based on political acumen. The “green-eyed femme fatale”(Govan, 2011b) is a seductress rather than a political activist.

Another theme used to characterise female combatants is that of motherhood imagery. Kendall (2015) reports that Mairead Farrell, a member of the Provisional IRA, endeavoured to distance the female volunteers from the Mother Ireland image “because it didn’t reflect what we believed in…we’d moved on from that”. The iconic maternal figure wholly undercuts any form of agency within female combatants by reducing them to flat characters with meaning imbued upon them, rather than revolutionaries with their own agency.

The themes used in the news media categorise the female combatants/terrorists/freedom fighters in such a way as to undermine any form of agency or choice. The female combatant is difficult to articulate to a mass audience, thus short-hand stereotypes paint her with broad brush strokes and whitewash her political activism to present a less threatening woman, rather than a violent agent of change. A significant outcome of preserving the image of traditional feminine passivity in the news media, is that the imagery is internalised by news consumers and this affects how female combatants are seen. By manipulating gendered cultural norms to advance their cause, women have a vital role in paramilitary organisations where certain activities cannot be performed by men without attracting unwanted attention and detection. However, this further exemplifies and solidifies women’s secondary role in society by fostering gender inequality. Women’s emancipation is truncated because social values, expectations and assumptions about women are preserved.

Women are underestimated because of their presumed non-threatening nature; they are not important enough to warrant investigation. Due to this, women can infiltrate areas without detection or suspicion. In addition, the sensitivities to searching women’s bodies allow women to feign pregnancy in order to hide bombs (Bloom et al., 2011).

Therefore, when the news media keeps these gendered narratives alive it is misinforming the population about female combatants’ capabilities. Perhaps this is over-reading and over-stating the news media’s role – however, as news media accounts of female combatants (and women in general) still present them as sex objects, these representations must be analysed and confronted. It is important to examine gender as a category of experience and a social process, but it must not be overemphasised as a reason for actions. When political violence is reduced to gendered reasons, such as the Chechen Black Widows (Stack, 2011), this only allows the female actors to be understood through the prism of gender, which is a social construction. This is internalised in social cognition and can have devastating effects upon women’s equality, as it fosters the male as the norm and female as the other.

Not only do gender stereotypes in the news media harm gender equality, they also impede counter- and anti-terrorism security measures. Nacos’s advice is that in order to combat terrorism, the opportunities for the manipulation of gender prejudices by terrorists must be shut down. A suggested method is to allow and encourage gender reality to inform counter-terrorism policies by removing the gender stereotypes of female combatants in the news media, as these stereotypes “reflect and reinforce deep-seated societal attitudes”(2005: 448).

To finish, this analysis of the news media endeavours to be critical rather than pessimistic as the news media also have the power to defy pre-existing norms by refusing to use familiar gender stereotypes to represent female combatants and women in general.

The Rise of the Chef: The Skill of Cooking Becomes More Complicated

Women have always been involved with food: gathering food; growing food; processing food; cooking food; presenting food; feeding their families. This is something that is true across the world and throughout history. Yet in many societies, indeed most, women have tended to be poorly represented at higher-status activities associated with food. Think of the Michelin chefs, famous chefs, head chefs – do we automatically think of men? It is fascinating that, even in societies in which women are considered “liberated” from the restraints of traditional gender mores, and protected at work from the most egregious cases of gender discrimination, women are significantly under-represented as top chefs, and women’s writing about food has been typically relegated to the areas of domestic and family life. Even now, it seems that men’s involvement with food, whether in preparing it or writing about it in the public realm is seen as having more gravitas; as being, almost by definition, higher status. The question is why this is the case? How did it all get so confused? After all, women remain the predominant cooks in the domestic setting. In order to understand the particularity of this phenomenon we must look back through history in order to understand the curious state of affairs we now find ourselves in.

Illustration by Rita Blair

The Creation of the ‘Le Chef’

It is during the 17th century we witness the emergence of the concept ‘The Chef’. Early chefs were members of the military and were exclusively men when, in the 17th century, the landed nobility began to rely on chefs to prepare food. The employment of a man in this capacity was seen as a sign of one’s status at that time[1]. As chefs began to take on more power in shaping the cultural and culinary world around them, they searched for ways to separate cuisine with a high social value, or haute cuisine, from the everyday, and little valued, cookery of women[2].

It is also at this time, the era of the Industrial Revolution, that we see the emergence of two distinct spheres, the domestic/private/feminine on the one hand, and the professional /public/masculine on the other. Prior to this, most women and men’s lives overlapped. Most work was carried out around the home where women were the primary food providers and caretakers while also taking part in home-based manufacturing. The Industrial Revolution relegated women to the private realm of household management, child rearing and religious education, as factories split the family unit. Working-class men worked in the mines, mills, and workshops and women remained in the home with the farm and family, creating the concept of “homemaker”. This division reinforced an already gendered world by identifying separate spheres, unequally weighted in favour of the masculine and the public. This dichotomy prevails to this day and continues to underpin our understanding of the public/private realms and the concepts of masculine and feminine.

This gendered division of the skill of cooking, aided by the rise of separate spheres for men and women, prevented women from participating in the growing restaurant industry in Europe (Ferguson 2004). Men controlled the means of professional legitimation such as authoring cookbooks, teaching at culinary schools, and exhibiting at culinary expositions thereby juxtaposing men in the role of ‘‘educator’’, and their women audience members as ‘‘students’’, helping to institutionalise the exclusion of women from professional cooking (Ferguson 2004).

The terms ‘chef’ and ‘cook’ are directly related to the separation of the public and the private sphere. The chef means “chef de cuisine” or “head of the kitchen” and related directly to the métier of food preparation in the professional public sphere. The term cook is understood more as much more working class, understood as being a nose-to-the-grindstone worker, a cog in a wheel. The chef is a professional who goes through proper training and rises in the ranks of a military system, a term historically associated with men, whereas the cook is self-taught, home-schooled, working by instinct and has historically been associated with women and the private sphere. A chef is granted higher public status and the freedom to be creative and imaginative with their food; a cook may only be responsible for following the chef’s recipes and produce food. In Ratatouille, Revel believes that the raw edible materials in the hands of “mothers” can lead to some fine “craftsmanship” but not great art, whereas the chefs have to transcend everyday methods to realise a grand cuisine which should be restricted only to professionals, who are undoubtedly men. When Colette asks Linguini “How many women do you see in this kitchen?” her response is illuminating,

“Because Haute Cuisine is an antiquated hierarchy built upon rules written by stupid old men. Rules designed to make it impossible for women to enter this world…” People think haute cuisine is snooty, so the chef needs to be snooty”[3].

Colette reveals that cuisine is associated with high culture and the world of the professional man whereas cooking is associated with working class people and women’s work. This hierarchical stance creates binaries – art/craft, cultivated or educated professional cuisines /local cooking, and male chefs/female cooks. This dichotomous relationship is played out in the world of the professional chef, where women and men are judged according to their gendered understanding of the skill of cooking within our culture, to women’s disadvantage[4]. The most recent academic work researching women chefs found that females are overly represented at the cook level and underrepresented at the head chef level, questioning whether the gendered understanding of chef and cooks reveal a bias against women based on their gender and historic hierarchical structures[5].

Illustration by Rita Blair

With the emergence of modern feminism, the predominant representations of the domestic are of oppression, entrapment, tyranny, enslavement; “captive wives and housebound mothers”. Women are portrayed as victims, subjects of male action and female biology, removing women’s agency and dismissing the domestic and the myriad of important actions that take place within this space. Betty Freidman argued in The Feminine Mystique that the domestic was contrary to the aims of feminism. As a result, the relationship between the female, food and the domestic has long been identified as oppressive; a representation of powerlessness. This has excluded the female in the domestic space from telling her story, who, while working within this private sphere was able to carve out her own area of power and independence. The greater intimacy, the very domesticity that is often seen to relegate women’s involvement with food to a “lower” level, also means that their cooking, writing and talk of food are rich with social context in the way that more formal involvement often is not, giving us abundant insight not just into their own and their family’s lives, but to social mores and historical context.

In recent years, food studies and third wave feminists have helped to open up the domestic space to further investigation, allowing us to recognise the significant lives of women in the domestic spheres. By conceptualising the kitchen as a space as opposed to a place, we can represent a site of multiple changing levels and degrees of freedom, self-awareness, subjectivity and agency. Here, food studies uncover a relationship with food and the domestic that reveals “opportunities” to demonstrate creativity and skill, and accruing value within families and communities and increasing opportunities to express resistance and power; it permits a revision of the text to allow for more a “more nuanced, culturally inclusive consideration”, suggesting that the domestic sphere functioned as a space of freedom and power for women even as it constrained them in other ways[6].

My PhD key factors for the gender disparity in head chef positions in the restaurant industry in Ireland. It has always fascinated me as to why, when women carry out cooking in the domestic setting, it is men who consistently feature as the top chefs in my industry. The rise of the chef has resulted in a complicated and misunderstood relationship for women and their relationship with the skill of cooking. The rise of the chef, married with the separation of the two spheres – the public and private – seems to me a good place to begin the story for women chefs and the many challenges they may face through their careers. Many challenges remain for women in this industry but by looking back at how it all began it helps me frame my research and develop it through the lens of feminist discourse.

References

[1] Trubek, A. (2000), Haute Cuisine: How the French Created the Culinary Profession, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Let’s begin with Henry V. It’s the scene where Captains Gower and Fluellen meet with their Irish and Scottish counterparts, Macmorris and Jamy, to discuss the siege of Harfleur. Macmorris and Fluellen have a particularly agitated conversation:

Fluellen. Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation.

Macmorris. Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain and a bastard and a knave and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation? (3.3.61-65)

Even though he is a relatively minor character, Macmorris’ response there – ‘what ish my nation?’ – has been taken up as the starting-point for approaching issues of national identity in Irish literature and drama, and also as the linchpin for Shakespeare and Ireland studies as well. Of course, Macmorris’ predominance in such criticism does not come without its problems: Stephen O’Neill has drawn attention to how

‘[s]uch privileging [of Macmorris] has as much to do with Shakespeare’s centrality to the canon – stage Irish characters in other plays from the period have not been analysed to the same extent – as it does with the centrality of MacMorris’s questions to a play about conquest, cultural difference and national identity.’[1]

O’Neill is right to advise caution here, but I think that ‘what ish my nation?’ still carries meaning in Shakespeare and Ireland studies, and in 21st century Ireland too. I don’t have far to look: I look at my country’s treatment of its women.

Druid Theatre Company’s ‘DruidShakespeare’

Women and Ireland

This year alone, I think of the unveiling and removal of the Maser Art mural at the Project Arts Centre. The establishment of the Repeal Project clothing company. #TwoWomenTravel, unflinching in its depiction of what Irish pregnant people are put through should they want to make choices for their own bodies. Brianna Parkins talking about wanting to see the Eighth Amendment repealed on the Rose of Tralee, an unlikely (but nevertheless, welcome) topic to be discussed on everyone’s favourite Lovely Girl competition. ‘We Face This Land’, a two-minute visualisation of Sarah Maria Griffin’s poem that dared to assert ‘The laws of the church have no place on your flesh […] Witches or women – these are our bodies which shall not be given up’.[2] However, Enda Kenny’s words still ring in my ears: ‘The T-shirts may be black and white writing on them but this is about people and people have different views.’ ‘This is about people’: but am I not a person? Are the twelve people who travel to the UK every single day not people as well? If my country does not recognise me as a person, then what ish my nation? (It’s also worth pointing out that his year also marks twenty years since the closure of the last Magdalene laundry in Ireland. I could go on about this country’s treatment of its women over decades.)

This is also a nation where its own national theatre omits – bar one playwright – women from its 1916 commemorative programme: leading to the birth of the #WakingTheFeminists movement, which, over the last year, has tirelessly worked to create change, equality, and equity in Irish theatre. Its work is far from over, but it is incredible to see how it has invigorated the theatrical landscape both in terms of scholarship and practice. (It’s certainly been a huge influence on my own research, as well as leading to the creation of Feminist Theatre Squadron, a podcast which I co-host with my colleagues.) When the movement was in its beginning stages, out of interest I decided to read up on the Abbey Theatre’s stats in performing Shakespeare. How many women have directed Shakespeare for the national theatre? I wanted to find out. And it turned out that, in the theatre’s 110+ years’ history, there had been only one woman who had done so. And she happens to be the incumbent artistic director of the Gate Theatre. (It was Selina Cartmell, by the way: King Lear in 2013.) I understand that Shakespeare may not be an immediate choice for Irish theatre practitioners: yet, as Mark Thornton Burnett cautions, ‘[a]lthough Shakespeare’s work can be seen as an imperial export, it also belongs to a broader dialogue – a system of negotiations, manipulations and imaginative reinscriptions.’[3] Shakespeare performance in an Irish context, then, can be a fascinating site for exploring issues of national identity. I also believe that it can be a fascinating site for exploring gender – for writing women back into the narrative.

Women & Shakespeare

As an intersectional feminist, I find myself grappling with the fact that I work on the most famous dead white man in all of Western literature. Shakespeare’s plays are not inherently feminist. But, the performance of his plays can be feminist. As Kim Solga writes, ‘feminist resistance to the gaze is both visual and structural; it’s a matter of both what is presented on stage, lifted up to audience view, and how that material is presented, the narrative that shapes its presentation.’[4] I also emphasise Sarah Werner’s idea that ‘all performances of Shakespeare engage in localized production of meaning’[5]: which has implications not only for the creative team’s approach to the play, but also audience members’ reception of the production: what I took away from it may not be the same as someone else in the audience that night. Margaret Jane Kidnie suggests that ‘a play, for all that it carries the rhetorical and ideological force of enduring stability, is not an object at all, but rather a dynamic process that evolves over time in response to the needs and sensibilities of its users.’[6] In line with Kidnie’s argument, I’d contend that any given Shakespeare production is one out of many products of an evolving process, that being the chosen play as it has been shaped by shifting cultural attitudes over time. So, in light of that, what I want to offer in this short piece are some examples of Irish Shakespeare performance that explore gender and feminism in interesting ways.

Druid Theatre Company’s DruidShakespeare premiered in May 2015. This was a seven-hour adaptation of the first Henriad into one continuous narrative, and in the three principle roles of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V, the Henrys were played by women. Particularly in the case of Aisling O’Sullivan’s performance as Henry V, DruidShakespeare used the performance of gender to subvert conventional ideas and patterns in Shakespeare performance – quite pertinent given the cultural signifiers that Henry V as a character and as an icon of English patriotism produces. O’Sullivan spoke with a guttural County Kerry accent, not only recalling her previous roles for Druid but also throwing into sharp contrast the ghosts of previous Henrys, the majority of these male and having performed at British theatrical institutions that Worthen would describe as ‘institutionalized Shakespeare’: examples such as Hassell at the Royal Shakespeare Company, Kenneth Branagh at the same theatre and on film, Jude Law for the Michael Grandage Company, Adrian Lester for the National Theatre, and Jamie Parker for Shakespeare’s Globe.[7]

Many of the theatres housing these performances are associated with institutionalised ideas of verse-speaking: indeed, some of them ‘have been extremely influential in the establishment of principles of Shakespearean verse speaking on the modern British stage.’[8] Not only that, O’Sullivan’s physical presence cut a distinctive presence. Considering the likes of Hassell, Branagh, Parker, Law, and Lester – all of whom played athletic, muscular, conventionally masculine Henrys – upon her first entrance, O’Sullivan’s Hal was lithe, wiry, and prone to posturing and slouching. Her chief uniform, too, was a large black leather jacket and jeans: contrasting with the royal livery with which we commonly associate Henry: not only a crown and a suit of armour, but the colours of red and blue, the three lions, and the fleur-de-lis (Hassell, Branagh, Law, and Parker all sported variations on this, harking back to Laurence Olivier’s take on the role). O’Sullivan is not the only female Henry in the current theatrical landscape: Lazarus Theatre Company produced an all-female version last year, and Michelle Terry played the role this year for Open Air Theatre.[9] Genderblind Shakespeare may not be innovative, but it is clear that O’Sullivan’s performance in itself is a response to conventions, traditions, and iconographies in Irish and Shakespeare performance practice – conventions that are predominantly quite male.

A feminist approach to Shakespeare

If we return to 2016, the most unexpected place to find an alternative response to this 1916 centenary year – a response which was certainly inspired by #WakingTheFeminists’ efforts – was in a reconstructed Elizabethan theatre on the Bankside in London. Caroline Byrne’s production of The Taming of the Shrew was announced as part of Emma Rice’s first season as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe earlier this year. In a press release announcing its final casting, the production was billed as marking ‘the centenary of the Easter Rising by revisiting 1916 Ireland and remembering the role of women in the fight for independence.’[10]

To be sure (perhaps because of where it was performed), this Shrew deals in commoditised Irishness – on the night I saw the production, the musicians played their jigs and reels on the bodhrán, tin whistle, fiddle, and guitar for the crowd’s pleasure. The production’s Irish Catholic context was brought to the fore: during her wedding, Katherina (Aoife Duffin) sat on top of two staircases that folded together to display a neon-light cross, whereas Petruchio’s (Edward Mac Liam) admission to Gremio (Raymond Keane) that ‘me father dead’ was met with numerous members of the cast blessing themselves with the sign of the cross. The text, too, was edited to add elements of Hiberno-English and Irish, such as ‘Jaysus’, ‘mo chara’, and ‘go raibh mile maith agaibh’.

But more pertinent in relation to the production’s feminist approach was the inclusion of additional songs, with lyrics written by the production’s dramaturg Morna Regan. A most notable example is the song ‘Numbered in the Song’ which, in Byrne’s words, ‘[remembers] all the women unsung by Irish history’, and was ‘in part inspired’ by Yeats’ poem Easter 1916, ‘where only the men are “numbered in the song”.’[11] This song, sung by Aoife Duffin as Katherina in a thick Dublin brogue, acted as an ongoing theme throughout the production: as Byrne simply states in an interview, ‘[i]t is a motif in the production, to be numbered in the song.’[12] The production also dispensed with Christopher Sly and the Induction in favour of Duffin performing the song after the musicians had left at the beginning, and Katherina’s singing closed the first half and also concluded the show. Again, this is part of this Shrew placing women – more specifically Katherina and her story – at its heart, and it is interesting that it did so through an appropriation of a male Irish writer’s words. With lyrics such as ‘The nation promised equality’, the song also threw into sharp relief the ongoing struggle for women’s rights in Ireland over the last hundred years.

From the get-go, the production was sympathetic to Katherina’s plight, and suggested that her taming by Petruchio was unnecessary and cruel. From Katherina’s spoken-word songs, to her newspaper being ripped out of her hand by her own father, to the production refusing to shy away from the psychological and emotional abuse Petruchio subjected her to (she spent the second half in her torn wedding dress, sleeping on a bed with only Petruchio’s cowskin cape as a duvet) – this Shrew emphasised the implications of a patriarchal Irish Catholic society on the lives of women. In doing so, it did not provide easy answers: Katherina delivered her final speech in resignation, anger, and frustration at the world she was forced to inhabit, and her relationship with a troubled-looking Petruchio was left up in the air.

Additionally, it emphasises these women’s voices: instead of Petruchio, Katherina was given the production’s final words through song, telling Petruchio that ‘I will not go to war with thee | Dulce et decorum est’ – the melody following the traditional tune ‘The Parting Glass’.[13] In addition, Amy Conroy’s Widow had an expanded role to play in this production: hovering in the background, quietly horrified at the misogyny unfolding on stage, providing quiet counsel to Katherina throughout. This relationship between the Widow and Katherina was built to the point where the final scene appears to be a battle between the former and Petruchio for the latter’s soul. (A Pyrrhic victory for Petruchio is implied here.) As Byrne comments, ‘[i]t’s not a play about the Easter Rising, but it attempts to chime with the experience of Irish women. The promises made in the [1916] Proclamation were not kept in the decades that followed and Irish women are still seeking equality to this day – much in the same way that Katherina is in Shrew’.[14] However, I am not sure if all of this was in the mind of Globe audiences throughout the production’s run. This is judging by the ‘Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!’ chant Petruchio encouraged the crowd to partake in very early on in the evening, as well as the cheering and whooping that greeted a later kiss between the two. Both times, Duffin’s Katherina was uncomfortable and unwilling to participate. This is perhaps illustrative of Werner’s idea of ‘a performance of Shakespeare that reflects the individual viewer’s perceptions and desires as much as it does those of Shakespeare or the director’[15]: indeed, performance reception is always a composite of individual and collective responses.

Writing last year for the Irish Times and reflecting on the very first #WakingTheFeminists public meeting, Lian Bell commented that ‘[d]uring the past weeks, through the voices of a multitude of women and men speaking up as feminists, this word came to life for me. I realise how important exposure to a spectrum of stories is – next year more than ever.’[16] Bell’s idea of ‘exposure to a spectrum of stories’ is crucial here: not only in our commemoration of 1916, but also in the year of commemorating Shakespeare’s death and the constant reinforcing of his dominance in world culture. (I’d also argue that it’s crucial in the context of recent world events, as well.) Feminist Shakespeare performance should not be the only intervention to make, but at least it should be one of many: specifically in the case of Irish women as we attempt to rewrite what ish our nation indeed.